An idea for easy KDE development within IIT Madras.

I think the most painful part of developing KDE is to build the dependencies etc from the SVN checkouts, i.e. setting up the development environment. Now, let’s say I’m developing kdenetwork. I will need to have qt-devel, checkout and build kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kderuntime and then kdenetwork. Now, a newbie who does know C++ need not be very comfortable with the build process or with debugging the builds, but could be capable of coding for KDE.

Why not set up a KDE development server within IIT Madras, to which you can SSH with X forwarding and just start developing?

For starters, let’s say I do this on my machine. What I would do is to create a new user account for “public” KDE development, and then learn to use kdesvn-build to automatically maintain fresh copies of KDE. Then I could request anyone who is interested to create an SSH key and mail me their public keys, so that I could put it in the authorized_keys of this account. This way, there will be no password sharing hassles.

Whenever someone wants to kontribute, all he need to do is to login through SSH, make his changes and build. Of course, once a developer has created a patch of his work, he could do an svn revert, so that it keeps the work clean.

The major trouble of making a public server of this type would be the bandwidth limitations that would cause SSH with X forwarding to be unmanageably slow. Any suggestions / ideas?